• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Big square

Sheffield Tony

Sheffield Tony

Nordic Pine
Joined
Nov 25, 2020
Messages
683
Reaction score
94
Location
Bedfordshire
So, looking for any sign of the interesting taps and dies we once had drew a blank, but this interested me. It's an old square, rule for size.

20260501_170659.jpg



20260501_171155.jpg
Made by Starrett, but this is the interesting bit:
20260501_171219.jpg
I think this is from Austin (the car maker) during wartime making aircraft components as one of the Shadow companies. How it ended in our tool drawer, I have no idea. It is still pretty useful :)
 
Austin airframes were nothing to do with the car folks I don’t think.
Company was based at Rearsby aerodrome just north of Leicester.
I visited it when I was a kid, sixty years ago.

Edit: sorry I got that wrong. The Rearsby company was Auster. 😳
 
Is there a groove along the backside of the blade not visible in the picture to reposition the blade along the body? Also is the little knob on the other end of the body another clamping knob? Or are they for adjusting the perpendicularity of the head and blade? I have a similar Starrett framing square with built in protractor with roof pitches and degree markings, bubble levels. The blade is graduated both sides. Bought it new in the late 1980s. I think they still make them.

Pete
 
I should look more closely. There isn't a groove in the blade like a combination square, and it isn't very thick. I've not investigated what the large screw actually does. The other end of the stock also has a groove with a stub of what looks to be tool steel inserted, presumably retained by the smaller knob.
 
From looking in Starrett catalogues, I think it might be a no 61 square.

At first glance, the illustration doesn't match but that's maybe because it shows a smaller size. Scale up to a 12" stock and the holes would be longer.

If that's right, the big screw would release the blade and the little one would release a tab to hold the stock level with the blade when resting on a flat surface.

BookReaderImages.php


That's from a 1938 catalogue. There are plenty more here:

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

archive.org archive.org
 
Yes, got it now thanks Andy, that stock support is a really neat idea, very handy addition.
Ps turns out that Athol MA is only an hour from me, and I’ve just checked and that’s still the main factory.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top